Haggard Gordon

@GwenOfSpiders @beauvoirbaddie Oh yeah I've read some of his stuff

@inimitablepgw I love the music of Wodehouse but I've met a few people who feel similarly and who've only read him in translation.

Curious how others see it: Is the humour in Wodehouse character-driven, or language-driven?

@DrJessTaylor There's a lot of strong feeling about this, understandably. 16 is a perfectly good age of consent when paired with a sliding scale - i.e., if a couple have sex when one is 16 and the other 15, I don't see a problem. When one of them is 30, it's repellent.

Can we just take a second to really take this in? How on earth has it come to this? Where a man can performatively ‘admit’ to sex with a child on an international platform but then couch it as some form of reflection or responsible accountability exercise - whilst deliberately leaning on our terrible, useless, outdated sexual offences act and age of consent? This man was 30 years old, and at the height of his fame - when he made an active choice to have sex with a child. I would use much stronger language here but he’s deliberately leaning on our consent laws, that a 16 year old child can technically consent to sex - meaning that he could technically have ‘consensual sex’ with a school age child. His admission and his disgusting performative ‘progressive’ ‘reflection’ that he is ‘exploitative’ makes my effin skin crawl. If this is not a predator in full swing, I do not know what is. This man is admitting to sex with children and no one is going to do a thing about it. Absolutely atrocious. Our laws need urgently updating to ensure no adult can ever have technically consensual sex with a child. No adult should ever want that; and no child should ever be exposed to it. End.

@grok @MatteButShiny @NoContextHumans Very interesting. Is this an example of pilot or machine error?

This incident happened on December 15, 2022, at Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Fort Worth in Texas. An F-35B Lightning II was attempting a vertical landing during an acceptance test flight when it bounced, pitched nose-down, and crashed. The pilot (a USAF major) ejected safely moments later and was unhurt. The jet was not yet government-owned. The video you're seeing is footage from that day, recirculating now.

Texas pilot ejects himself from F-35B at airbase after crash landing😳

RIP J.H. Pryne (1936 - 22 April 2026) My supervisor used to say he was the greatest poet in the English language since Milton. I used to see him on his bicycle around Cambridge. "Lack spreads like snow back by the path to the iron pipe flaking and not succeeding"

@DrDavidVernon Oh God, that's appealing. I don't know that edition but perfection would have to be one with Mary McCarthy's intro, surely?

perfection doesn’t exi…

I always imagined EJH's voice to have a bit more sunburnt mirth about it, somehow. Still, it's this sort of thing that gives X a good name.

@TheBigPic It's a baton-passing. The podcast brats.

A very normal day for The Big Picture.

@DobbyClub06 👵👵👵👵❓🤪

Peep Show Emoji Quiz 1) 🧦👖✅👖🧦✅🧦👙❌😡🐔 2) 😢😢🤔😢🍾 3) 👬🚐🚐 4) 🐺🏦👢💯🥪👅 5) 🐕😵🍀🍆🍑 6) 💷🐍🛁 7) ❌💉💨🤔👍📻💉🧑‍🎤 8) ❤️🖤🤸‍♂️❤️💛👍 9) ➡️📱💋🫶👦👧👦👧👦👧👦👧 10) 💔❌👍🍆🍑🏝️✈️🔥👩‍🏫👩‍🏫🏢👨‍🏫👨‍🏫👍 🍆🍑👍🗣️✍️👴👊👊🍆💦

@inimitablepgw Gussie Fink-Nottle by a mile. Honourable mentions for Roderick Spode and Aunt Dahlia.

Which Wodehouse character steals the scene every time they appear?

@Watchman_motto That's the one detail I remember vividly from the book and think about often. Love it.

I remember reading ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’ by George Orwell. And there’s a time when working in Paris he and his roommate were so broke that they essentially lived on red wine and bread. The pro tip was, if you took a piece of raw garlic and rubbed it all over the bread, it made you feel full longer because you could taste the garlic on your breath. Have never forgotten this for some reason. Maybe I think the diet would fit well with me. I could live on bread, prosciutto, hard cheese, and red wine.

Enough of the bullshit, enough of the rhetoric, enough of the fiddling around the edges, enough of rearranging the deckchairs, enough of pointless commissions and even more pointless reports, enough of the lying, enough of the deceit, enough of the gaslighting, enough of the masquerade, enough of the pretending it's time for govt to get a grip, to show leadership, to show determination, to do the right thing, to act. It's time to put the water industry back into public ownership and the time to do that is now. But have they got the balls?!

@James_Martell_ Almost finished this just as I read your tweet. Marvellous.

10 books you need to read before you die Blanchot, The Last Man Duras, Moderato Cantabile Joyce, Portrait of the Artist Deleuze & G, Thousand Plateaus Borges, Labyrinths Woolf, To the Lighthouse Derrida, Aporias Kafka, The Castle Tolstoy, Death of Ivan I. Beckett, Malone Dies

@eliistender10 I've been working on a cocktail Called Grounds for Divorce Heard that recently. Pretty good.

@Poochigian I always smile when I think of that fourth-wall heckling, "A proper stripling and an amorous"

What's your favorite line by Shakespeare? Mine is: "like quills upon the fretful porpentine" ("Hamlet")

@gtredoux @BoylanRoger Christopher Hitchens gives a good defence of Dahl when writing about this in a book review (presumably of Amis's memoirs - it's in Unacknowledged Legislation)

I think it was Kingsley Amis who reported that Dahl, meeting him a literary confection, advised him to take up writing for children. Amis said he wouldn't have the first idea. "Don't worry, the little bastards will swallow it." Now, Amis may well have been tipsy at the time ...

Roald Dahl and Ernest Hemingway in London, 1944. Dahl credited Hemingway with teaching him to stop his day's writing at a high point to make it easier to resume the next day.

@ronnieo147 His comments on THE 147 are burned into my brain: "Ronnie's got other things on his mind and so has everybody in the audience" "He's got it - JUST" "Ooooh, sensational!"

Finished my match to get the news that JV has passed away. Love to Rosie, Brooke and Gary. Such a great mate who I loved spending time with, absolutely gutted.

@Lovandfear Nabokov's deathbed sign-off to his son takes some beating: "I hug you, I'm proud of you. Be well, my beloved."

If you're a writer, write ‘i love you’ without writing i love you.

@BarrieDarke @DrDavidVernon 1. Experience 2. The War Against Cliché 3. Time's Arrow 4. The Information 5. The Zone of Interest As ever, I have no Money.

@DrDavidVernon 1. Money 2. London Fields 3. Time's Arrow 4. Experience 5. The Zone of Interest

@majavonwestphal @Jacxdad3376 For a real, attributable quote on this, there's Steven Pinker's book about the historical decline of human violence which he partly attributes to the adoption of reading fiction as a leisure activity; he calls fiction a "technology of empathy." I love that.

@Jacxdad3376 Does anybody here have the original author/source for this quotation? Google shows me the same snippet posted across social media, but I couldn't make out its origin. (Would love to quote it; can't without a source.)

@richwatkin Holy heck!

Welsh music royalty at the Mg x